Truth in Memoir

     Let's jump right in, shall we? According to the all knowing Google search bar, the definition of a memoir is as follows. "A historical account or biography written from personal knowledge or special sources." Now the question is, does a memoir have to contain 100% of the truth 100% of the time? I think it does. If you look back at the sage words of Google, you'll see that for a writing to be called a memoir, it has to be a historical account written from personal knowledge or in other words, it's a true story that happened to you. I think that in a memoir, it should be common sense that it should contain the truth.

     Now you may be asking, what if they are itty-bitty tiny altercations of the details to make the story more interesting? That... is okay. I think it is fine as long as the major parts of the facts are left intact. Now, let's say an author writes a story on World War II. If he or she writes a story about a general of Japan that left the Axis powers to join the Allies and tried to sell it as a memoir, that would not fly. If he or she decided to say that Dwight D. Eisenhower had some inner turmoil and used it as a subplot in order to make the book that contains an other wise politically correct main plot more interesting, that would be fine.

     Do we need to label stories with genres? I think so. Genres are a useful tools for things such as book recommendations because they help people to narrow down options and find books they'll like easier than they would if genres didn't exist. I doubt genres will be going anywhere anytime soon and thank goodness they aren't. They are very helpful to both writers and readers a like.